Space Shuttle Atlantis makes one last trip

The second of November saw the Space Shuttle Atlantis make its
final journey, being transported 16 kilometres from the Kennedy Space Center
(KSC) Vehicle Assembly Building to its new home, a custom built
museum at the KSC Visitor Complex.

The journey took over 11 hours and gave the public as well as
Nasa staff the chance to wish it well on its way to its retirement
home. With its 24 metre wing span, KSC has had to build a dedicated
hall for the orbiter. The final wall of its new home will only be
bricked up now Atlantis has taken its place. The shuttle
will stand on an 11-metre high pedestal, posing with its cargo
bay doors open and its landing gear retracted. The museum is
set to open to the public in July 2013.

Nasa Administrator Charles Bolden, who himself flew on four
shuttle missions including commanding STS-45 aboard Atlantis, said:
"Atlantis' final mission may have closed out the space shuttle
programme, but the spirit that created that programme and built her
is very much alive." Bob Cabana, a shuttle astronaut and now a
director of KSC, said; "Atlantis now takes on a mission of
inspiration for future exploration."

The Space Shuttle fleet was retired in 2011 and the honour
of closing out the programme fell to Atlantis. The final mission
STS-135 saw Atlantis visit the International Space Station in July
2011. Atlantis first flew in October 1985 and completed 33 missions
including launching the Magellan probe to map Venus and the Galileo
spacecraft to Jupiter, both in 1989.

Atlantis was one of five shuttles built for space -- Columbia,
Challenger, Discovery and Endeavour being the others. In addition,
a prototype named Enterprise was built to conduct glide flights to
test the shuttle's aerodynamics. Sadly two orbiters, Challenger and
Columbia, were lost in disasters in 1986 and 2003 respectively.
Columbia had been the first of the space shuttles to fly, launching
on April 12, 1981 -- 20 years to the day since Yuri Gagarin had
become the first human in space and the first to orbit Earth. The
final flight of Atlantis in July 2011 concluded a 30 year programme
which had seen 135 shuttle missions.

Atlantis is the final shuttle to take its place in a museum.
Discovery took
its place at the
Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy
Center outside Washington DC in April 2012, whilst
Endeavour recently made its way through the streets of Los Angeles
to its new home at the California Science Center. The
prototype craft, Enterprise, is on display at the Intrepid
Sea, Air and Space Museum in New York. Click here to view
Nasa's photo gallery of the shuttles making their way to their
museums.

Since the retirement of the Shuttle programme Nasa has not had
the capability to put humans into space. The space agency has,
however, been spurring development of the commercial space economy
in the US, helping companies build a new generation of spaceships
that can transport cargo and astronauts to low-Earth orbit and the
space station. For transporting cargo to the ISS, Nasa has awarded
contracts to SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corporation (Orbital).
Last month SpaceX's Dragon concluded its first commercial resupply
mission to the space station giving Nasa the ability once more to
transport cargo to -- and from -- the orbiting complex. Orbital has
yet to demonstrate its ability to launch a spacecraft to the ISS
but plans to do so in 2013 when its Antares rocket will lift the
cargo ship Cygnus into orbit for a demonstration flight to the
space station.

Nasa's capability to ferry astronauts to and from the space
station is also being developed through agreements with private
companies SpaceX, Boeing and Sierra Nevada Corporation. In August
2012 Nasa announced further funding awards for these businesses
which are developing spacecraft for human spaceflight. SpaceX is
developing a crewed version of its Dragon spaceship, whilst Boeing
is building its Crew Space Transportation (CST)-100. Sierra Nevada
Corporation has designed 'Dream Chaser' which would land on a
runway in a similar style to the space shuttles.

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